"It's the End Of the World As We Know It." Vol. 2.
More of what to watch while looking away. A series of lists.
Here’s the thing about lists, at least the ones that I have a history of making: They can become obsessive. A list can’t be a list because it always, secretly or otherwise, wants to be THE list.
But being authoritatively thorough is both folly and exhausting.
And yet…lists want to be more than themselves, greater than limited numbers. They can’t help it. Neither can the writer, apparently.
The good news is that the first list in this series was absolutely not something created with obsession, just a quick desire to vent about the world and offer up a smattering of series to help us all weather the storm. Or the heat. Or the end of the Republic.
Depressing, but also helpful.
It wasn’t planned, barely thought out, dredged up from memory and just a list of series that would be great for everyone to re-watch, or start fresh years later if they hadn’t already. All I knew was that it should start with dramas and include, therefore, the five best dramas in the history of television. So I put it together and this was it:
It's the End Of the World As We Know It.
It got a lot of attention, sparked a lot of great comments and of course featured the one thing that all list compilations have — people who thought I “forgot” series, even though the list was clearly not meant to be all-everything. But that’s cool — I fixed that with a comment. And then, just the other day, even went back into the story and changed the numerical lists to bullet lists, so nobody would be confused that I was ranking shows (and I wanted all the following lists to have that same bullet list formula, and I’m nothing if not a completists; you know, except for making completist lists).
So here we are for Vol. 2, of who knows how many, and because I find joy in the simplicity of being unstructured and alive in the moment, consider everything that follows just random but excellent suggestions you can use. In fact, maybe you should start with Vol. 1 and slowly, lovingly, gloriously, work your way through each, devoutly keeping your sanity as the world falls around you.
I mean, things are going to be bleak for a while, people, you can take your time.
There’s some great picks here. Let’s get to it.
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